Page 18 of The Devil You Know

“I never said it was implausible. I just wondered if it was, you know, a fully functioning individual. A human individual.”

I pinch my eyes shut and take a few quick breaths through my nose. My second shirt of the day is now sticking to me and I’m officially miserable. If I respond, it’s likely to be in a way that alarms the staff and gets me kicked off this flight.

“So,” he says after a moment, when he realizes I’m ignoring him, “it’s not someone from work?”

I roll my eyes. “The last thing in the world I want is to date another lawyer. I want the opposite.”

“Wouldn’t the opposite be a criminal?”

“Hardly.” I attempt to peel off my jacket. I don’t know why the hell they had us all get on board if they knew we weren’t going to leave.

“Fine,” he says. “What’s the opposite of a lawyer?”

“A guy in a Hallmark movie,” I reply, one arm now half trapped in my jacket sleeve. “Someone with an honest job. Someone rigorously ethical.”

He laughs. “Ah, rigorously ethical like you?”

“I’m ethical enough.” Yes, I’m aware that by qualifying how ethical I am, I may have proven his point.

He sighs, helping me pull the jacket off before handing it to me. “So what does this guy do? Your date tonight?”

I glance over at him. I imagine he’s hoping to ridicule Thomas somehow. In this one instance, I’m glad the guy does not own a Christmas tree farm. “He’s a chef.”

“Guess you’ll be paying for dinner. Good thing you’re so liberated.”

Heat, fatigue, frustration…they’re rapidly eroding my ability to put up with this situation, and even more rapidly eroding my ability to be around Ben. “Lots of chefs do really well, and I don’t care how much he earns anyway.”

“Spoken like someone who’s never had a broke day in her life.”

“Right,” I reply. “I forgot you’re from the mean streets of Newport.”

He raises a brow, and his mouth curves upward, as if to say, Gemma, how do you know so much about me? It’s a question I should probably be asking of myself.

“So tell me about this guy,” he continues, turning his head my way. “I mean, aside from the things I can already deduce: that he shares a two-bedroom with four other men, and still drives his mom’s 2005 Honda.”

“You’ve clearly never watched a Hallmark movie. Chefs live in cute cottages, either on the beach or in the mountains, with a small herb garden in front. Everyone knows this.”

He rises from his seat and moves into the aisle. “I’m gonna go out on a limb and say you don’t know a lot of real-life chefs.” He reaches up, pulls off his tie, and then begins unbuttoning his shirt.

That’s when any shred of restraint inside me…evaporates.

“What the hell are you doing?” I demand. “This isn’t your weekend Chippendales’ show.”

“Gemma, it’s three hundred degrees in here. I’ve got a t-shirt on under this. You’ll live.”

He peels off the shirt, and I divert my eyes away from his very, very nice biceps, his smooth and surprisingly tan forearms…and they fall to his belt.

Then they fall lower, which is when I think about the elevator.

I felt it. He’s large. Too large. It would be irritating, having to deal with that thing nestled up against me every morning and night.

“If our positions were reversed, I’d be complaining to HR right now,” he says.

Shit.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I reply, quickly looking away.

He closes the overhead bin and takes the seat beside me again. “I practically watched your thoughts scroll across your face and they were surprisingly filthy. I’m not sure I could even say them aloud.”